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The China Study

Of the books I am reading I would say that this one is the most eye-opening. I recommend this book to everyone. It is a shocking look at industrial and traditional American agriculture and dietary habits. The findings are definitely something I have suspected for quite some time, but many of these facts are kept a secret from the public and many people would like to continue to deny. The findings are; a diet rich in animal products (or any animal products for that matter) and processed foods will cause numerous health and obesity problems, make you feel poorly and cause you to have less energy than you should. Not live the vibrant life our bodies are designed to lead.

Colin T. Campbell is a PhD and has conducted thousands of experiments over his career (unfortunately many of these experiments were on rats) His finding can be summarized in this passage on page 7: “People who ate the most animal based foods got the most chronic disease. Even relatively small intakes of animal based foods were associated with adverse effects. People who ate the most plant-based foods were the healthiest and tended to avoid chronic disease. These results could not be ignored. From the initial experimental animal studies on animal protein effects to this massive human study on dietary patterns, the findings proved to be consistent. The health implications of consuming either animal or plant-based nutrients were remarkably different”.

Dr. Campbell was raised on a Dairy Farm, his father diet of a massive heart attack at 61. He began his career and research trying to prove the opposite of what he found in the end; that high protein diets and animal based products are good for the human body and even necessary. This way of thinking has been the status quo for years and turned out to be very a wrong and a deadly assumption. He wrote the book based on scientific research and findings, this book is not about animal rights or the environmental impact of animal agriculture. It was written purely to open people’s eyes as to how we are wrecking our bodies with destructive eating habits.

The book is called the China Study because he also made many comparisons to the diets of people who live in China, a country that eats far differently than the US or other western countries and, as a result, has much lower occurrence of diseases of the western world. The research also found that environmental factors can play a part and help initiate some disease but these diseases are generally accelerated by a diet high in animal proteins and are, in fact, turned off when a plant-based diet is adopted.

Another particular passage that I found interesting was: “if nutrition were better understood and prevention and natural treatments were more accepted in the medical community, we would not be pouring so many toxic, potentially lethal drugs into our bodies at the last stage of disease. We would not be frantically searching for the new medicine that alleviates the symptoms but often does nothing to address the fundamental causes of our illnesses”.

He also found “that the human body can derive all essential amino acids from the natural variety of plant proteins that we encounter every day”.

In his studies he has been able to make direct links between a die high in animal products to heart disease, obesity, autoimmune diseases (arthritis, M.S.), most common cancers, diabetes, bone, kidney, eye and brain disease, the list goes on and on. Like I said previously, the research also found that many of these diseases can be stopped when a more plant based diet is consumed.

So, hope you said YES! You CAN heal yourself with Brussel Sprouts and Broccoli 🙂

If you are concerned about your health, feeling good and minimizing your risk of disease please read this book! Dr. Campbell also makes an appearance in several documentaries, these are also very informative and eye-opening. There is also a companion Cookbook, which I am going to check out.